


Scars

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Series: Tender Is the Night [3]
Category: What We Do in the Shadows (TV)
Genre: Blood Drinking, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Catholic Guilt, Character Study, Child Abuse, Crying, Death Threats, Dysphoria, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fingerfucking, Heavy Angst, Holding Hands, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Coital Cuddling, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sad with a Happy Ending, Self-Harm, Some Humor, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Guillermo de la Cruz, Trans Male Character, Transphobia, Vaginal Sex, WWS21
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 19:27:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29194551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: “It smells kind of like you,” Nandor says. Calmly, casually, practically a shrug, like that isn’t the most vulnerable and intimate thing Guillermo has heard in days--weeks--years.And then, to his absolute horror, Guillermo feels the traitorous pricking of tears at the corners of his eyes. Nandor has leaned away, but he’s still closer than he was before, fanning the surface of Guillermo’s skin with his gentle breath.Guillermo will not cry. He will not cry.He can laugh about this. He’s not entirely human--he’sallowedto laugh at this.So he does what his body knows best, and he bites down with an unprecedented savagery on the inside of his cheek. The familiar and comforting warmth of his own blood flows onto his tongue before he can realize his stupidity.“Guillermo,” Nandor says. Low. Throaty. “Why do you do that?”--Or: Guillermo's guilt grows with him from the moment he realizes he's different. Something between ordinary and inhuman. Then Nandor comes into his life, all danger and love, and Guillermo begins to think he can finally feel alive.
Relationships: Guillermo de la Cruz/Nandor the Relentless
Series: Tender Is the Night [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2125197
Comments: 27
Kudos: 54





	Scars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Interrobam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Interrobam/gifts).



> This was the first project I ever attempted for the wwdits fandom, but I struggled to complete it because of how deeply personal the exploration of guilt and trans identity became to me. Then my mate Interrobam inadvertently inspired me with some dialogue prompts ("Hey, hey, calm down. They can't hurt you anymore" and "Here, take my blanket") which tied in perfectly with the theme of guilt-fueled nightmares. And finally, the Who we Smooch in the Shadows prompt event rolled around, and I realized I could knock out a whole bunch of them in one go: hand holding, cuddling, pillow talk, heart, and Saint Valentine.
> 
> Please heed the tags on this. It's dark--the first time I'm publicly letting out my real thoughts and feelings sometimes about dysphoria and religious guilt. It's difficult to say exactly which passages could be triggering, since the content is just scattered throughout. So if you think that may not be for you, please take care of yourself first and don't feel like you need to read.
> 
> It bears reiterating here--one of Guillermo's parents is extremely transphobic. Proceed with caution.
> 
> Songs that inspired this: "Oh God" by Orla Gartland; "Myth" and "Take Care" by Beach House; "Oh My Lord" (cover) by Camille O'Sullivan

_There will always be ribbons of loneliness running through who I am. -Jenny Slate_

The day that his religion studies teacher threw up the image of a pixelated martyr onto the projector, strung up from a stake and wavering in the temperamental shadows of the unlit classroom, Guillermo wondered what it must have been like to be Saint Sebastian. How it must have felt, to stand and gaze straight ahead and be pierced through knee and neck and thorax to bleed out into certain pain and uncertain death. How, too, it must have felt to be the flies that flocked to his body when it was all over, treading human flesh that quickly cooled underfoot and lapping up the congealing pools of blood where they seeped into the cobblestones below.

It should have been a gruesome thought. Instead, Guillermo found himself transfixed on the painting before him, incapable of tearing his eyes away from the grainy rendering. And he found himself thinking first of how terrible and fascinating it would be at once to witness such a death--and quickly on the heels of that: that he deserved to be the one writhing there at the post, bound and staked through the ribs.

It surprised him, that day and in the many days after that, how calmly he could entertain the thought. Soon enough he came to the conclusion that the idea had always been nesting in the cavern of his chest, easy, immutable, just on the wrong side of uncomfortable, and nameless.

The idea that he was wrong, that he should never have been born into humanity. That bleeding over and over for it might somehow begin to atone for the sin that was the fact of his existence.

He ground his teeth and bit the inside of his cheek when he slept. He never really did work out if that was on purpose or not. He was twelve years old and allowed to be confused about these things.

Seventeen years later, lying in the sepia gloom of his closet in Staten Island with its nineteenth-century windows pasted over with newspaper, he runs his tongue over the too-sharp, too-human canine there, and he knows he’s not allowed to be confused about these things anymore. He decides he does it on purpose. He decides he would like to live like Saint Sebastian in this sort of way, and hurt however he can. He congratulates himself on the swell of flesh on his inner lip that makes him look like he’s been stung by a bee, and that flares with vengeance when he reaches for the mouthwash an hour later in the bathroom.

\--

_If your tooth hurts, your tongue keeps going there. You are always conscious of a wound. -Ingmar Bergman_

He was thirteen the first time he woke up from the dampness of tears on his cheeks from the vicious bloom of pain inside his mouth. He’d dreamed that he was a boy, that the eldritch monarch of faeries that loomed over the forest at night had visited him and demanded his name. He’d dreamed that he’d given it freely, with abandon, that he had nearly frightened the faerie half to stupefaction with the eagerness with which he offered himself up as a sacrifice. He dreamed that the faerie had smiled, razor-toothed in the green moonlight, and had tapped him on the nose and told him that such gifts meant nothing if he would so readily rid himself of them. And then the faerie pressed its taloned hand to his chest and his hair grew and grew until it swirled around him like a river and he was drowning.

He came to with his hands clawing at his chest and the scream shuttered in his throat where it would not dislodge because his teeth were buried, wet, predatory, in the flesh behind his cheeks.

His sister Vanesa stirred in bed at his side. And then she frowned and sighed in her sleep and rolled over to sling her arm across his belly. He didn’t dare breathe. Her skin was a hot line of sticky pressure there through the cotton of his sleeping shirt, burning him, pinning him down. Reminding him: _this thing inside you must not be named_.

So he centered himself on the taste of copper on his tongue and the sounds of apathy around him. The fan overhead ticked and creaked perilously. The window cracked open above them let the night July smell of the city stream in, the cries from streets over of nighttime pleasures and pain, and Guillermo lay shuddering in his cold sweat, too stuck close to the sheets to move.

He didn’t name himself that night. He spent the next three hours, instead, wondering if his teeth could ever leave scars on the insides of his cheeks.

\--

_I fear I will be ripped open and found unsightly. -Anne Sexton_

“Is this what you want to look like?”

Guillermo kept his eyes resolutely on the ceiling.

“Look at me. Carajo, look at me!”

Cold fingers on his too-hot cheeks jerked his head down and forced his gaze to meet his father’s.

“Look at this. Fucking look at this.” A laptop screen shoved under his nose, the blue light blinding him. “Is this what you want to look like? Huh? A wannabe man? Fucking midget. You want these scars? You want to take off your shirt and make everybody stare at these fucking things on your chest? Puta madre!”

Guillermo deigned to glance down for the briefest second at the photos on the trans blog pulled up on his father’s laptop. His heart fluttered once, sending a telltale flush of blood up his neck. Those were the selfsame photos he’d saved to his hard drive, that he’d opened and closed and opened in the dark of night when the faerie visited him again and reached its claws inside his chest to rip him open with the pain of being him. These were the photos he scrolled through as he sat in a criss-crossed mess in the janitor’s closet during recess, because no eyes were fit to see him and the wrongness that was his everything.

He prided himself for his silence, despite it all.

He drew a dark sense of satisfaction from the fact that he kept his lips pressed together when the hands reached forward, hands, hands, hands, and they seized him by the hair and dragged him off the couch and his browbone glanced off the corner of the coffee table and the carpet burned his bare legs.

He dug his teeth into his tongue: tasted the blood there, the atonement of suffering.

He thought of that awful faerie in the forest that never ended, and the sacrifice of Saint Sebastian, and how much he wanted his pints of blood to spill out so everyone would finally see, _see, I’m clean, I’m human, I’m like you again_.

And then the icy edge of the silver crucifix ripped from his bedroom wall was being pressed into his forehead, and his father’s voice rose in an unintelligible ocean of exorcism, and Guillermo remembered why he bled.

He bled so he didn’t have to name these things. So he didn’t have to come apart at the seams. So he wouldn’t have to admit he wasn’t human.

\--

“So who are you, huh, _Guillermo_? ‘Guillermo.’ Devil’s spawn, taking the name of a saint! Get the fuck out of my daughter, diablo! Get out, or I’ll kill her myself with my bare hands to drive you out of this house!”

\--

He’d thought that telling his father he’d chosen _Guillermo_ for the namesake of Saint William would finally be the bridge between their understanding.

He figures now that God knows he really only picked the name because the first movie he ever fell in love with was _Cronos_ by Guillermo del Toro. Because God knows everything, apparently.

Everything except who and what the fuck Guillermo de la Cruz is supposed to be in this world.

\--

Maybe it’s a 400-year-old scarab beetle, this thing inside him.

Maybe the eldritch faerie doesn’t exist outside him. Maybe it’s been latched to the inside of his ribcage all along, and it won’t die, just like he won’t die no matter how much he prays for it and bites himself to bleed and runs across the four-lane road downtown over and over again to goad the grim reaper to his side.

Maybe it’s not a fucking metaphor. Maybe he just really likes the taste and texture of blood, because he’s never been anything remotely close to human.

\--

_I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken pieces of God in me. -Anne Sexton_

A part of him thought his father might be right. That he’d wake up after his top surgery with nothing but a valley of realization and regret hollowing him out.

He woke up, instead, feeling nothing.

Guillermo wondered many things in that moment. Perhaps he’d already grown to forget the sound of his father’s voice and the weight of his hands and the taste of his condemnation in the last four years since he and Silvia divorced. Perhaps he’d gone so long drawing his own blood that the capacity for joy had been leeched straight out of him.

Or perhaps, and he thinks to this day that this is the more likely, he’d gotten used to living his life with his body housing God and himself, and now that God had been carved out there was only him left: and that meant that there was nothing.

The feeling didn’t leave him gaping as he thought it might. Guillermo blinked, slow and calm, and laid a careful palm across his stomach through the flimsy hospital gown. He breathed. He watched himself breathe, and listened to his heart thunder and pump.

He inched his fingers up to feel the bandages there. He was still numb, and the touch of skin through fabric to skin was strange. 

_Is this sainthood?_ he wondered. _Have I bled enough? Has God finally been plucked from my insides?_

_Am I human again?_

But then he remembered that he only had himself left inside, and that to be himself was to be nothing.

When Vanesa popped in twenty minutes later with a styrofoam cup of hot chocolate gone cold in her hand, he asked her, “Is being human being nothing?” She stared at him with wide eyes like she was seeing him for the first time.

To this day Guillermo is not sure if she heard him. In either case, if she did, she didn't respond, and they both tacitly and in tandem agreed to go back to their pretense.

Guillermo was happy. A month later, he could cross his arms over his chest for the first time, gingerly, just so, and he was his own version of happy.

\--

This was the summer before his first year at CUNY, and Silvia and Vanesa welcomed him and his grinning, carmine scars and his nights of groaning awake in bed into the only decent bedroom in their tiny apartment.

He choked with guilt on their kindness. He tore open his stitches trying to learn how to bake bread for them too soon, and it cost him three more consultations again with the surgeon, and the guilt mounted behind the pressure of his ribs along with the debt.

Guillermo found that when your sense of self is close to nothing, it’s awfully easy and quiet to fill yourself with all the other things that you think make up who you are.

He sleeps with it. Bathes with it. Cries a little in rebellious flares of joy when he yanks his shirt on over his head every morning and sees the flatness stay in the mirror, and feels his heartbeat that much closer to his hand when he lays it over his chest.

He goes to school with it. Goes to work with it. It seeps out through his teeth, to the point that he bites it down behind his shy and pearly smile, and yanks out self-deprecating jokes instead.

He revels in the bursts of rage he feels when he grinds his canines together straight through the knob of flesh inside his cheek that has been pierced over and over, like a vampire’s favorite human neck.

\--

“Welcome to Panera. Can I get you started with a drink or a side?”

“Just the Pick Two for today, ma’am. I--oh. Sir?”

Guillermo taps his name tag with a tight smile. “Okay. The Pick Two. Which one will it be for you today?”

\--

“Galtung says that violence is the limitation of the potential of specific sectors of human society.”

“Good paraphrase. And what do you think of that, Guillermo?”

\--

“Welcome to Panera. What can I do you for today?”

“Memo, it’s your fucking sister.”

“Oh, God. Maybe don’t swear that loudly through the drive-through.”

Vanesa’s voice grins through the crackling speaker. “Fuck off.”

\--

“Professor...Derrida says here that there has to be a ‘nonviolent relationship to the infinite as infinitely other’...in order to be liberated...is that even possible?”

“The notion of being liberated?”

“Well, that too, I guess. I was referring to the nonviolent part, actually.”

“Hm.”

“I mean--is it at all possible to have any kind of relationship aside from a violent one with the other?”

\--

“Thanks for choosing Panera! First off, I’d like to tell you about our all-new Wednesday special…”

“Oh, nice voice crack.”

Guillermo laughs at that. He can laugh at that. He thinks he’s allowed to. 

\--

_He and I are closer than friends. We are enemies linked together. The same sin binds us. -Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband_

The year is 2009. Guillermo’s teeth almost stop grinding at night and he almost doesn’t have to bite down on his tongue every time he pulls out his student ID card from his wallet and he sees the name different from his own printed across the top. 

His scars twitch, sometimes. He’s lost sensitivity in his nipples, just like the surgeon said, but the scars seem hyper-sensitive as ever, like two gashes of life across his chest, where he can press his fingers and feel the writhing of his heart that somehow twists and beats still behind the new skin. On the days when he can laugh about it, on days that are becoming more frequent and more normal, he can step over the intrusive thought of the Twilight Zone moving inside him.

That year is, incidentally, the year that he meets Nandor the Relentless.

The man is a column of pale skin in the moonlight like sand under the sun in an alternate universe. It’s the lazy tug of the corner of his cape in the wind that seizes Guillermo’s attention. He stops at the mouth of the alley, hands on the straps of his backpack, leaning in, and he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose just in time to see the glint of the black-haired man’s fangs before they sink into the throbbing flesh of the victim’s neck.

Guillermo stands rooted to the broken asphalt.

The young man thrashes without coordination. The vampire has his arm locked like a vise around the lower portion of his torso, clamping his arms to his sides with a single flex of his biceps. With his other hand, the vampire grips the victim’s chin and yanks it to the side, baring skin and veins and pulsing life to his tongue. Guillermo is transfixed on the wink of ancient rings on the fingers digging into the victim’s jaw. The vampire’s lips lock around the puncture wounds, and there’s the faintest sound of lapping, swallowing, slow and poised and venomous.

Guillermo isn’t aware when his own heart felt like it stopped beating altogether.

His senses are dialed to eleven. He hears the rustle of the night birds’ wings above him, the thrum of the victim’s blood in time with the rush of his own in his arteries. A coldness spreads fast and furious through his body to the edges of him, and he’s alive, he’s _alive_ for the first fucking time in his life, because he’s part of this and his teeth ache to be the ones splitting through that human skin and partaking of the blood of the lamb of atonement.

The vampire lifts his head. His hair’s disheveled, just slightly, but the movement reads as nothing less than regal to Guillermo, stock-still and frozen to the ground.

His fangs and his lips weep with blood, blackened by the moon and the shadows around them.

Guillermo raises his hand in a wave. Swallows.

“Hi,” he whispers.

\--

The guy’s name was Thomas Shabwell. Guillermo discovers this when he’s rolling the body down the brow of the ravine behind the abandoned lot that used to be Jimmy’s Used Car Sales, and the victim’s wallet flops out of the back pocket of his ripped jeans. Guillermo bends down and picks it up and opens it before he can help himself.

“Don’t look at that,” the vampire warns him. His name is Nandor. He told Guillermo this before he settled in a comfortable perch on a nearby crag, watching through sated and half-slitted eyes as the human struggled to drag the drained body across the crumbled grass and toss it over the edge.

Guillermo holds up the wad of cash in an awkward show of explanation. “I, uh--I could use the rent money.”

Nandor fixes the lace-lined cuffs of his doublet under his cape and seems to consider that. “Yes, fine, but don’t look at their names. That won’t help you.”

Guillermo wants to laugh at that. Doesn’t this age-old vampire know that names are as meaningless and exchangeable to him as the next platter of unleavened wafers at Communion?

\--

He doesn’t regret that thought immediately, not when Nandor flashes him a grimace of a smile and extends his hand to him in a ginger shake and pronounces, “Yes, you may be my familiar. Come to the house tomorrow evening and we will set everything up.”

\--

He doesn’t regret it even when he opens the wallet of the second victim and peers at the name stamped on the driver’s license through the window, against Nandor’s advice, because Nandor is hovering in the garden behind him and Guillermo’s back is turned to the vampire as he busies his hands with folding the legs of the woman to fit her into the little blue wheelbarrow.

He doesn’t even remember the name, even though he made a point to stare at it and commit it to memory to prove to himself that it all means nothing.

He doesn’t remember, because every fiber of his being is consumed with the newfound and exhilarating tension of bending over in the withered garden of a seven-hundred-something-year-old vampire who stands behind him and watches him with the dark and disinterested eyes of a contented hawk to ensure that he does his first burial right.

\--

Guillermo regrets it when he disposes of the third body. It’s the second burial, and the first one he attends to alone.

Her name is Ricel. He doesn’t know her. She has the sort of face that he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t forget if they were classmates, no matter if the birth date on her license places her at the same age as him.

With every other body, he caressed their limp joints with a kind of wistfulness, imagining how flush and firm they used to be with blood running through underneath the surface of that now-ashen skin. He imagined being the one to bring those useless necks up to his lips and pierce their veins with his arrow-sharp canines. He tried to think how it might feel to be the one that bit, and not be the one whose flesh was bitten. To feel the flow of submission, hot and fast, inside his mouth, without it having to be his own. To not have to be Saint Sebastian.

Now he stands here at fucking four o’clock in the morning somewhere between a Tuesday and a Friday, because time means fuck-all when your sleep schedule can never quite sync between your family’s and your vampire’s, and he’s wholly incapable of lifting a finger to touch Ricel’s carcass and haul it from the wheelbarrow into the narrow grave he’s made.

He stands there and he regrets the blasphemy of thinking that names would never matter to him again.

After all, he offered up his old one to that faerie so long ago, in that bygone eon when it used to visit him in his dreams and demand a sufficient sacrifice for his healing, because he was so desperate to be something: to be human and not _nothing_.

He hides his hands in his pockets and tries to look up at the sky. He wonders what his father is thinking, an unknown number of dozens or hundreds of miles away underneath the same stars of misunderstanding.

The tears blind him next, and then the nausea. It barrels into him with the force of a pickaxe and a shovel. He doubles over without time to wrench his hands from the pockets of his jacket, and throws up right then and there with a pathetic gasping retch into the center of the open grave. It splatters everywhere and flings droplets across his glasses.

\--

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been…”

His shoe squeaks on the unpolished floorboard of the booth.

“...It has been a very long time since my last confession.”

\--

“Has it really been two years now, Guillermo?”

The human beams up at Nandor with stupid, wide-eyed hope. It’s one of Nandor’s favorite looks on him.

“Yes, master. Almost to the day. Remember when--”

Nandor flings up a hand. “I remember, Guillermo.”

“And you were like, _aaargh_ ,” Guillermo talks over him, miming the theatrical tearing of fangs into jugular, “and I was there all like, _aaaah_ , and then you turned around and were like--”

“Yes, I said, _hello, human, hi_ ,” Nandor finishes for him.

The grin freezes on Guillermo’s face. “Right. Yeah. That’s exactly what happened.”

“And I knew you were going to be the perfect familiar for me ever since then,” Nandor coos. His eyes are no longer facing Guillermo, but fixed on the head of the hunted deer across the fancy room. His hand comes down absently to pat Guillermo’s knee.

 _You knew I would be perfect for you the moment I offered to roll the body down the ravine and never tell anyone about it_ , Guillermo corrects him in his mind. 

He likes to pretend he doesn’t know why. Why he did that--why he does these things. Years later, in front of the cameras, it will be all too easy to give the lens his practiced shrug and shy smile, with a simple _I’ve always wanted to be a vampire_.

Like that isn’t the easiest fucking lie to cover the catacombs of complexity behind it all.

As if dying and becoming eternally undead weren’t just a hilariously ironic way of latching onto that addictive feeling that overcame Guillermo that night he first met Nandor: the feeling of being seen, of being alive, like he’s never felt before.

\--

The feeling of not being nothing. Not being human, but _something_.

\--

“I know you guys probably don’t go to the police about stuff like this, like, as a whole practice, I guess...but a part of me kind of wishes that you’d just open the screen and look at me so you know what I look like. And then go to the police so they can arrest me and this would all be over with.”

Guillermo polishes the right lens of his glasses with the scratchy wool of his fair isle sweater.

“Maybe that’s the way to stop all of this from happening. From...feeling like this, maybe? Maybe I need to be contained. Locked up somewhere. It’s not--it’s not normal to be thirsting for blood like this.” He swallows. Twiddles his thumbs. “I used to think it was just my own blood. Kind of like a sacrificial thing. But it…”

His voice drifts into a whisper.

“...It goes way deeper than that. It gets way worse.”

\--

“Vampire-only meeting, Guillermo.”

“Vampire-only party, Guillermo!”

“Guillermo! Hissing and making claws is only for vampires! Are you a vampire?”

“Guillermo. I will not call you through the ether if I need you. You do not--you don’t know how to use the ether.”

“Vampire-only sexy planning, Guillermo.”

\--

On the other side of the screen, the booth remains dark and silent. Guillermo glances up from his thumbs, thinking for the briefest moment about reaching through the screen and showing the priest the blood that dried in crescents under his fingernails because he didn’t stop to wash anything off before running here.

“Am I absolved, Father?”

A beat later, the squeak of another door far across the chapel echoes over empty pews. Guillermo sighs. Go figure that the one night he decided to come in for a confession, the father would be taking a leak while Guillermo ranted about vampire fetishes and murder to thin air.

\--

_Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry. -Friedrich Nietzsche_

Nandor has his moments when he chooses not to be dumb and hilarious for the sake of compensating for his centuries of shamefully quiet life. 

Guillermo knows this, and he understands. Nandor was the one that pillaged and raged across the eastern hemisphere in a spray of swords and fire. Everyone knew his name, and spat it like poison on their tongues, because his name was synonymous with the shamelessness of death and reckless avenging.

Now he pillages in secret, during the night, and a little pink-cheeked human familiar runs after him to dispose of the evidence for him.

Guillermo watches Nandor stand in front of the doors to the cells in the basement every week with his hands crossed behind his back, eyes forward and unseeing, as the moon slowly folds over into the stronger waking of the dawn outside their Staten Island mansion.

And Guillermo waits for him, and understands.

\--

True to his nature, Nandor pretends not to know of Guillermo’s nightmares, but he hears them and he remembers them.

They begin sometime during the human’s first year of service and never seem to wane until he reaches his fourth or fifth year. From then, something grows quiet and still in Guillermo’s face, just like the quietness and stillness of the day as the Staten Island vampires slumber around the house away from his closet room, and Nandor lies flat on his back in his gargantuan coffin and listens for the heartbeat of his familiar several hundred feet away through the wall.

The first time Nandor awakes from the sound of Guillermo’s nightmare, it is not because of a scream or a thrashing from the other room, but because of the scent of virginal blood pouring from an open wound.

Nandor stiffens and dares not uncurl his fingers where they have become fists across his chest. The voice of that fresh blood calls to the yearning deep within him.

Has Guillermo had an accident with a knife? Is it one of those irritating and inconvenient things where humans bleed randomly from their noses?

But he rather likes Guillermo as a familiar--he is not so proud that he cannot admit that--so he remains steadfast and stony in his coffin until slowly, finally, the scent of that liquid temptation dissipates from the air and the little hitch in Guillermo’s lungs begins to fade.

The next evening when his familiar shuffles in with that characteristic self-deprecating smile to open his coffin and help Nandor to his feet, Nandor has all but forgotten about the strange and intimate encounter with Guillermo’s blood and grief, until he glances down at the human for the first time and notices the little flesh-colored band-aid covering the corner of his mouth where something has swollen and gone red.

Nandor cocks his head to the side and considers that. 

It takes him several more interrupted slumbers like this to finally figure it out, and only because the fifth time, his hunger and his curiosity both drive him to slide the coffin open and slink to the door of his crypt and finally crack it open to see what is going on. From his vantage point he can make out the mirror of the nearby bathroom, where the reflection of his familiar is examining the inside of his mouth which seems to throb, raw and tender, with fresh tearing from his own teeth.

Nandor wonders then--for the first time--if maybe Guillermo would make too dangerous a vampire on his own.

\--

(But the bad dreams come and pass, and Nandor has been on this earth for close to a millennium and soon forgets these profound thoughts about the human who attends to him. Guillermo is Guillermo, a fragile and dogged little thing who runs himself ragged from devotion, and his teeth are as blunt and pathetic as the next human’s. Even his eyes are so weak that he needs special pieces of glass through which to see.)

(There is nothing dangerous about Guillermo at all.)

(Only the perilous realization that Nandor can no longer live without him, without that virginal smell of innocence that seems to pervade Guillermo’s naivete about everything else in life, and so Nandor must keep him waiting to be turned for as long as he can bear it.)

\--

It is a week after the showdown at the Nouveau Théâtre des Vampires when the nightmares slam Guillermo again in full force.

An easy tension has settled over the house, Nadja and Laszlo and Colin Robinson more comfortable to joke about what happened rather than talk about it head-on. To his credit, Laszlo did say point-blank “he’s killing fucking _vampires_ ” multiple points throughout the week, and Nadja did lean away from Guillermo in the hallway a total of two times with a weird flash of fear in her eyes, but aside from that everyone’s lips are sealed.

Slowly, cautiously, Guillermo descends into this version of peace.

He sleeps with his rosary under his pillow and a band of stakes strapped to his ankle. He keeps one hand fisted around another stake under the blankets and lies flat on his back, ready to spring up if the door to his closet so much as jiggles.

He doesn’t know at first why he doesn’t just leave again. But then days like this happen, when everything has been uneventful for five or six nights--no signs of assassins, no sounds of talons scratching at the doors or kitchen windows--and the nerve endings under his skin tingle with the familiar addiction to being alive and needed and among the dangerous, and he remembers why he stays.

Exhaustion cloaks him relentlessly on the seventh day. His hand goes slack around the stake and his head drops back. He sleeps. He dreams.

He dreams of hands in his hair, of the silver of a crucifix burning the skin of his thirteen-year-old forehead.

He dreams that he stands and he grows and the hands slip from his curls, and he’s broad and immense like the shadows that never die, and he reaches forward to grab his father by the square of his jaw and bring his neck to Guillermo’s mouth.

In his dream, Guillermo has no fangs. His teeth are human. Sharp from years of biting himself and punishing his own tongue, but blunt as the next man’s set of teeth. He tears into the neck before him--it’s faceless now, he doesn’t remember why he grabbed this man or who it is to begin with--and the unfaced man writhes and screams in his hands. Silver shatters around them. Water, black and viscous, seeps into the living room of his imagination, rising up from the evergreen carpet under his bare feet.

The voice keeps screaming and screaming.

 _He’ll kill you. He’ll kill you. With his own bare hands_ , it says.

Guillermo has a stake, suddenly, in his other hand. He turns it and plunges the pointed end into the chest of the man trembling and twisting in his grasp.

Everything bursts to ash. The blood on the neck between his lips erupts in flames, and soot and destruction sear his taste buds.

It screams, and it screams, and it screams.

_Guillermo. Guillermo._

_Guillermo_!

Hands, larger, stronger, like stone, grab him from behind. Guillermo gasps and snarls and lashes out with the scorched end of his stake. A bellow shakes him to wakefulness.

His eyes fly open.

Everything’s too bright for his brain to adjust from the pitch black of his dream world. Guillermo jackknifes upright. His chest heaves; he scrabbles for the glasses on his nightstand. He jams them onto his face.

Nandor is crouched on the floorboards at his bedside, clutching his bleeding hand to his chest.

His bleeding, throbbing hand very squarely impaled through the center with a stake.

“Fuck--shit-- _fuck_ \--”

Guillermo tumbles to his feet and lands instead on his bad knee and his hands in front of Nandor.

“Master, master, I’m so sorry,” he babbles. “I didn’t know it was you. God--I’m sorry--”

He wrenches the injured hand closer to him to take a better look, prompting another hiss of pain from Nandor, and Guillermo shoots him an apologetic look upward.

“Next time you are having a nightmare, Guillermo, warn a guy about the pointy sticks you keep while you are sleeping!” Nandor somehow has the wherewithal to scold him.

Guillermo grimaces in reply. Further apologies fail him. In their quiet and heavy breathing, Guillermo grasps Nandor’s hand in his left and with his right cautiously wiggles the stake out. Nandor’s breath hitches a second before the wood pops all the way out. Guillermo lets the thing clatter to the floor, and sets to staunching the blood with the hem of his sleeping shirt.

“I’m really sorry,” Guillermo whispers after a moment.

Nandor lays his uninjured hand over where both of theirs are clasped in his lap. He bares his fangs in an awkward smile. “I don’t mind you sticking me with stakes, Guillermo. Just warn me next time, yes? It’s not very fun outside sexy times.”

Well, that’s an image to be filed away for processing another time.

“Oh, and do be making sure you’re not sticking me in the chest, okay?”

“Right. Yes. Good.” Guillermo nods shakily and pushes his glasses back up his nose where they’ve slid down from the slick of his sweat.

“Are you okay?”

Guillermo doesn’t even register the question at first from how foreign it is. He opens his mouth and starts to say _yes_ , when he remembers that this is Nandor. Things are changed. The theater happened--the _slaughter_ happened--and there’s not much else left for him to be able to lie about. Against his will, against both of theirs, really, he’s been ripped open and laid bare before the eyes of his master.

“Just a bad dream, is all,” he musters with a brave smile.

Nandor looks at him. His eyes are glowing. Soft, almost.

Guillermo glances down at where his hand is sandwiched between Nandor’s palms. Nandor hasn’t moved an inch away from him.

“I hope it heals okay,” says Guillermo.

“It’s a wooden stake and I am a vampire, so it will be slower. But don’t worry!” Nandor tacks on, at the panicked bulge of his familiar’s eyes at him. “It will be o-akay very soon. Only a little scar.”

Guillermo steels himself to lift his hand off Nandor’s injured one for just a second to take a peek. The sickness hits him in the pit of his stomach. That’s not just a little scar that will be left behind.

“Oh, Guillermo, it’s nothing to cry about,” Nandor scoffs. “I’ve had many scars from years of battle. This is nothing.”

Guillermo really, intensely disagrees with that, even wants to release a wild little laugh at the absurdity of it all--he is a vampire slayer and he is holding hands with a vampire--but he just grimaces and holds his silence.

“You’ll be going back to sleep now, yes?” says Nandor.

“Uh. I probably need to swing by the kitchen real quick and eat something.”

Nandor’s brow furrows. “Is that a thing that humans do after having a bad dream?”

 _Sort of. Maybe. Yes. I wouldn’t really know_. “Not really, but I don’t think I can really go right back to sleep just yet.”

“Hm. Okay.” Nandor stands, pulling Guillermo up with him, and beckons with his head at the doorway. So Guillermo slips past him, and just like that their positions are reversed, with the familiar leading the vampire by the hand as if the imperious Nandor the Relentless has just commanded him to guide him forth toward the kitchen.

Once there, Guillermo drops their hands to tear off several squares of clean paper towel and bundle them around Nandor’s injured palm. He orders the vampire to keep pressure there, and Nandor complies with a single raised eyebrow.

Guillermo feels guilty turning his back on him, but he does anyway to scrounge around the fridge and the cabinets. He finds his last jar of his favorite grilled and marinated artichoke quarters, half a loaf of the rosemary sourdough he made last week still smelling all right, and a clean-enough fork. He waits with tight-lipped and stiff-toed silence as the slices of sourdough cook in his toaster oven.

Nandor sniffs delicately. “I smell garlic.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Guillermo grabs the lid of the jar and screws it closed.

The toaster oven dings. They both jump, comically, and Guillermo grabs the piping bread slices with his bare hands from the tray and slathers on a heap of the oily artichoke mixture on top.

Nandor watches with rapt and unguarded fascination as Guillermo bites into his slapdash concoction. “Does it make you feel good?”

Guillermo just barely refrains from moaning. He licks his oily lips before responding, “This is my favorite thing ever from when I was in college. It’s the perfect pick-me-up.”

Nandor surprises him then by leaning in, so close, impossibly close, to take a whiff of the slice of artichoke-covered bread in his familiar’s hand. The edge of his face is so close to the food that if he darted out his tongue now, he could taste it.

“It smells kind of like you,” Nandor says. Calmly, casually, practically a shrug, like that isn’t the most vulnerable and intimate thing Guillermo has heard in days--weeks--years.

And then, to his absolute horror, Guillermo feels the traitorous pricking of tears at the corners of his eyes. Nandor has leaned away, but he’s still closer than he was before, fanning the surface of Guillermo’s skin with his gentle breath.

Guillermo will not cry. He will not cry.

He can laugh about this. He’s not entirely human--he’s _allowed_ to laugh at this.

So he does what his body knows best, and he bites down with an unprecedented savagery on the inside of his cheek. The familiar and comforting warmth of his own blood flows onto his tongue before he can realize his stupidity.

“Guillermo,” Nandor says. Low. Throaty. “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?” Guillermo speaks around the wetness in his mouth, willing himself, _I will not cry, I will not cry_.

“Don’t think I don’t know about what you do after these dreams,” Nandor says somberly.

Guillermo’s heart lurches at that. How long has Nandor known? How long has he smelled the blood on his familiar and never said a thing?

Nandor frowns. He shakes his left hand and lays it, wrist first, against the dip of Guillermo’s sternum under his thin and blood-stained shirt. “Your heart,” Nandor murmurs. “It races like a rabbit running for its life.” He shoots his familiar an admonishing look. “You are not okay, Guillermo.”

“I’m fine, master. I promise,” Guillermo chokes out. He takes another bite of the bread, and the sting of vinegar pours into his open wounds. Shocks him and grounds him.

“Come,” Nandor says, brooking no argument with his tone. He whirls and leads the way down the hall back to his crypt.

Guillermo has just shuffled up to the doorway when Nandor reappears with a bundle in his arms. “Here, take my blanket.”

“W-what?”

“Humans get very cold sleeping in the winter, yes?” Nandor says, like it’s obvious where he’s going with all this. “Take this blanket, and go to the big blue room. You will be much more comfortable there.”

“What about--what about your hand?”

Nandor sniffs in a moment of consideration. He lifts the paper towel to check, and sure enough, the bleeding has stopped. “Well, then I suppose I’ll have to sit a while in the blue room, too, so when you wake up you can check and make sure my hand is still there,” he offers magnanimously.

That is special Nandor language of need and want. Of secret yearning in response to the kind that Guillermo has been harboring in the quiet of his heart all these years. He recognizes it, and doesn’t call Nandor out on it, because that would be looking a gift horse in the mouth.

He wakes up hours later in the blue room, bothered, more than likely, by the unfamiliar mustiness of his surroundings, but true to Nandor’s word the unused four-poster bed there is much more comfortable and the fur lining of Nandor’s extra blanket weighted down Guillermo enough to immerse him in a blind and dreamless oblivion.

He glances to his side, and Nandor is perched there on an ottoman with a scroll in his lap. Guillermo can’t tell for a second if he is awake or asleep. He lies there, waiting, watching, and when the scroll doesn’t move, he knows that Nandor is unconscious.

His gaze dips down to the half-open palms curled up at the corners of the scroll. The wound has healed into what looks now like a weeks-old scar. It’s almost like a star, almost like an extracted heart, jagged at the edges and shining with the same kind of living and breathing flesh as the two scars across Guillermo’s own chest.

\--

The next evening, Guillermo accompanies Nandor on a lazy hunt. The new hand scar catches the moonlight, and for the first time, guarded by the speechless sentinels of the pine trees that cannot understand his emotions, Guillermo lets himself cry.

\--

He calls his mother and Vanesa in succession the day after that. He’s gone back to his closet room under the stairs, because sleeping in the big blue room felt like a fever dream too good for him to deserve.

Vanesa comes to the phone with the fondest “Memo, you shithead, we missed you,” and Guillermo closes his eyes and forces a stinging breath through the bridge of his nose and cries all over again.

\--

_His hands are big. He took my hands and put his hands in mine. I could not tell whose hands were trembling, which hands were holding. -James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk_

Guillermo hears Nandor's nightmare for the first time some weeks later.

In the time that has passed, Guillermo has braided his master's hair and reluctantly shown him the photos on his phone of his younger self with braids and school uniform. He has locked himself and his master in a bathroom and unbuttoned his shirt to show Nandor his scars, and Nandor has reached forward to trace the curve of them with his thumb, deep lines carved into the marble of his brow as he considers the evidence of Guillermo's supposed bravery against the twisted scar newly exposed on Nandor's own neck.

In that amount of time, Guillermo has cut Nandor's hair and beard in his requested modern makeover. The two of them have almost kissed. Guillermo has almost wrung him out publicly in a restaurant, and Nandor has revealed to him with a confused and amused little smile that the date and the new look are all for him, and Guillermo has decided with a little huff of fondness and resignation that he'll always be angry with Nandor and in love with him.

In that time, they have shared their first kiss against the brick wall of the club under the stream of moonlight. Guillermo has run his hand shamelessly across Nandor's neck scar in undisguised awe and worship. They have kissed and pressed their lips and hips and bodies against each other, Guillermo's back flush against the wall in an alley at nighttime just like the first time they ever met, and he's fantasized about biting down on Nandor's tongue and tasting him and mingling their pain with their pleasure.

They've kissed, and gotten chased back into their car by the downpour of rain, and kissed and kissed again, and then arrived home and kissed some more.

Now Guillermo sleeps in the blue room, almost officially, when Nandor's nightmare happens.

He fell asleep some hours ago trying to decide how best to rearrange his wall of decent sketches on the new and entirely larger wall of tourmaline wallpaper in his new room. A voice whose timber is vaguely familiar slinks toward him in his sleep, calling, _Guillermo, Guillermo--Guillermo!_ and the deja vu hits him and he flies awake all over again.

Papers scatter in every direction as he jolts upright. He's disoriented, glasses askew. He swings his legs over the side of the bed and his bare feet hit the unfamiliar carpet with a thud.

He can't seem to get through the door of Nandor's crypt or slide away the coffin lid fast enough. Nandor writhes below him inside the coffin, face contorted and agony written in the lines of his brow and mouth.

"Nandor!" Guillermo gasps. "Nandor. _Nandor._ Wake up."

When all else fails, Guillermo reaches into the coffin without hesitation, latches onto one of Nandor's hands crossed over his chest, and squeezes. Hard.

The vampire's eyes snap open. His pupils are blown to hell, and they shrink to feline slivers against the gold of his irises as they adjust to the hasty candlelight and human silhouette that greet him. He thrashes again, this time without recognition and with utter terror and abandon.

Guillermo seizes him by the shoulder. "Hey, hey, calm down, Nandor. I'm here. I'm here. They can't hurt you anymore."

The words trip out of his mouth before he can make heads or tails of them. Somehow, something in him knows a little bit of what might be plaguing Nandor in his dreams. His gaze dips in confirmation to Nandor's free hand, which has flown up to press down against the jagged scar across his neck.

"I'm here," Guillermo repeats again, less breathless this time. Softer. "I promise. You're not there. Nobody can hurt you."

Nandor's wild eyes finally cease to orbit the room and come to rest solely on his familiar. Guillermo creases his face with a tired and assuring smile. 

"Hi," he whispers.

At the end of the day, it's this they always come back to.

"Guillermo," Nandor says.

"Yeah," says the human. "It's me."

"Not--there?" Nandor asks.

Guillermo's heart cracks a little. "Not there," he confirms, though where _there_ is, he hasn't exactly ascertained yet.

"Not there," Nandor repeats softly. More to himself.

Guillermo gives his hand another squeeze. Nandor looks down at where their fingers intertwine, the picture of surprise, as if the connection were so natural that he wasn't aware of it until Guillermo bodily reminded him of it. Guillermo himself follows his master's gaze and finds that it is Nandor's scarred hand that he has pressed inside his own. He feels something beating there, then, something phantom but unmistakable, and it brings to Guillermo's memory again the notion of being alive, only like this when they are together and no one else can tell him this world is not for him.

"I dreamed I was back in Al Quolanudar," Nandor admits with a candidness that unnerves Guillermo.

He's still getting used to this: this easy way of sharing between them after the kiss, and the implication, unconscious as it may be, that they may yet somehow be equals.

"Master, you should sit up," says Guillermo.

Nandor obeys, with his familiar's solicitous hands to steady him. Eventually they make their way down the hall, down to Guillermo's blue room, where the human pats the edge of his bed and the vampire gingerly settles into a stiff-backed seat on the bedcovers next to his lover.

"Tell me what I can do," Guillermo says. He lays his hands palms down on the knobs of his knees.

Nandor looks down at those hands, half in doubt, half in want, a little bit in wonder.

"Did I tell you how I was turned?"

No, he did not. Guillermo's answering silence says as much.

"He was my nemesis on the battlefield. He slayed as many as I ever did, and more. Every time I burned down a village, it seemed that he was one step ahead of me and doing the burning of my own villages and cities and temples. One day, I stabbed him through the chest in close combat. My closest generals would attest to this. They had seen the slaying with their own eyes."

Nandor draws a hand over the front of his face. For a moment, Guillermo thinks his mask flickers, and his true age peeks through, the lines, the weariness, the remembrance, the killing.

"But he was alive, Guillermo. And he came back for me. He came for me alone, and he stole me away and tied me against the carcass of a dead horse and he ripped my throat out. He brought torches with him." At Guillermo's quiet little gasp at his side, Nandor nods gravely. "Yes, he was unlike any other. He would have died all over again to be seeing me die a tortuous death with him. He would have burned me as I died."

Nandor's sigh shudders through him.

"But I struggled with my last breath and I bit him. His hand was coming near my face and I pierced his wrist there to hear him scream. His blood flowed into me."

Guillermo doesn't realize he has been holding himself so deathly still until Nandor glances askance at him again, and he's a little blindsided by the yet-unfamiliar openness of seeing Nandor's trimmed beard and exposed neck in the soft light of the room.

He stares up at Nandor and imagines it. What it must have felt like to be Saint Sebastian, warrior of the east, blood drained, hands tied behind his back, life leeching out from him in carmine rivers and expending his last drop of energy to bite back.

To turn himself into a vampire and damn himself to eternal lust and undeath to win his last fight over the one who'd meant to burn him alive.

Guillermo turns to imagining, on the heels of that, how it must have been to turn to a creature of the night in those days and be driven by whips and the edge of swords from his homeland and his thirty-seven wives. 

To lose his lands and loves to pillage across the sea in secret.

To live, to die, to die in living, to be so powerful and damned that victory over any human would lose all meaning.

"I'm sorry," Guillermo says at last.

Nandor's shoulders droop. "It is not your fault, Guillermo."

Perhaps not, but everything else in his life is. Guillermo doesn't know how to articulate the pragmaticism of this. Instead he says simply, "I know. Still, I'm sorry."

A part of him wants to ask if this is the memory that haunts Nandor and prevents him from plunging his own fangs into Guillermo's neck and turning him. If trauma stills his hand around Guillermo, or if it is care, or regret for his familiar's sole chance at humanity. Or if it is because turning has to be deserved: has to mean something.

Turn me, Guillermo wants to scream. It doesn't fucking matter. I've never been human anyway. I've never been anything else than nothing.

Nothing, and a bag of flesh full of off-kilter heartbeats and scars.

Nandor's palm is upturned on his knee. Guillermo doesn't think Nandor meant it to be that way, but he seizes the opportunity to touch him anyway. After all, this is easier than navigating language and the nuance of everything still unsaid between them. He folds his fingers into Nandor's and it feels right. No, it feels--okay, and alive.

"He can't hurt you anymore," Guillermo whispers. "You earned that."

Nandor has nothing to say to that. He looks at his human, things swimming in unspoken depths in the pools of his eyes. They're gold sometimes in the light, sometimes jet black at moments like this. Guillermo shudders once and sees Nandor leaning in and keeps still.

With his free hand, Nandor cups the soft curve of Guillermo's jaw and brushes their lips together. They're both enveloped by twin sighs. Unsteady, breathing, holding still, hearts jackhammering between them.

Guillermo nudges his face closer to seek out Nandor's mouth again. Nandor meets him with a gentle pressure against his lips. Guillermo sighs again, and his grip tightens infinitesimally on Nandor's hand. Nandor waits a beat and squeezes back.

Nandor kisses him again. And again, and again, guiding Guillermo's head with his hand on his cheek to angle them closer together. The quiet of the blue room fills with the lazy smacks of their lips against each other.

Then Nandor licks the seam of Guillermo's lips tentatively, and Guillermo opens up to let him in and suck in his exhale of cool air and swirl it with his own hot breath. Guillermo runs his tongue against the edge of Nandor's, swallowing up the gentle sound that escapes the vampire.

He's alive, and they're something, he wants to say. Instead he slides his tongue straight over Nandor's to run it behind his teeth and then over the tip of his fang.

Nandor doesn't hold back his moan. He surges forward, hand tightening possessively on Guillermo's nape, and he drops his familiar's other hand so he can cup Guillermo's head and angle it up completely toward his. He presses Guillermo's chest to his--moans again in appreciation when Guillermo slings a leg over Nandor's thigh on the bedspread--and explores Guillermo's mouth relentlessly. He scrapes the very tip of his fangs over the human's tongue and the inside of his mouth and is rewarded with an unconscious moan from his lover.

Guillermo pulls away just long enough to gasp a little for breath. He hikes himself up into a kneeling position then with both legs straddling Nandor. He grabs the vampire's face between his hands and mashes their mouths back together for another kiss, and another, and another bite, and another and another.

Nandor's hips buck upward in arousal. Guillermo gasps into his lips from the friction between their legs. He slides down, enjoying how Nandor loses all poise and ruts up into him through their clothes, and slides up and down again as they make out just to draw from Nandor the joyous sounds of him coming undone.

"Nandor," he mumbles against his lips. "Nandor."

The vampire understands. He leans up, arms wrapped around Guillermo's torso, and leans them back until Guillermo has to hold onto him to keep from sinking against the soft unsteadiness of the pillows. Nandor loops his fingers into the top of Guillermo's curls and pulls his head to one side. His neck is bared. Nandor pulls away from Guillermo's mouth to trail kisses down his jaw and down, down the skin of his neck. They're open-mouthed, wet, tongue lapping at Guillermo's pulse.

Arousal shoots straight through Guillermo's core as Nandor latches onto the smooth skin of his neck and licks. He wants to writhe and buck, but Nandor's grip keeps him exactly where he is.

"Nandor," Guillermo gasps.

A growl low in Nandor's throat answers him. He reached between them to fumble with the buttons of Guillermo's night shirt. He manages to get them undone without popping off more than one. He returns his attention to Guillermo's neck, and this time Guillermo cries out beneath him.

"Clothes off," Guillermo demands, breathless.

Moments later, in haste and recklessness, they've disrobed to their underwear. Nandor stares down at him with unguarded admiration and hunger. Guillermo feels a rare breed of boldness and stares back at him, at the lines of scars that twist across Nandor's torso, at the thatch of hair down his chest and at the scar on his neck and the scars down the ripples of his muscled arms.

"Bite me," Guillermo says.

"You don't want that," Nandor replies, but the rasp of his voice says yes, _yes_ , oh please.

"Bite me," Guillermo repeats. He sits up and curves his head back to expose his neck right where he wants Nandor's fangs to pierce him.

Nandor's resolve crumbles in seconds. He licks his lips. Grabs the sides of Guillermo's face and keeps it there with both hands, tilted back, and descends with open mouth and bared fangs.

Guillermo nearly comes the second the point of Nandor's fang touches the thin stretch of skin separating him from the vein beneath. He lets out a choked sound half like a sob, and then he's pulled flush against Nandor's bare body and the vampire's fangs plunge into him like icy steel knives. 

Guillermo stiffens--a knee-jerk reaction. Nandor pauses only a moment, and then he sinks all the way in, letting the pain sit on the surface of Guillermo's consciousness, and starts to suck.

Guillermo cannot remember a time he felt so helpless and alive. So willing, so pliant, so ready to die to feel something.

And then Nandor's one hand slides down between their bodies and pushes down his underwear and dips inside him, and Guillermo cries out again at the feeling. He grinds down on Nandor's finger for more.

Nandor tips him back against the pillows for better leverage. His finger stills against Guillermo's entrance, and the human bucks impatiently, panting, "Yes, yes, Nandor," before Nandor adds another and pushes inside.

Guillermo's vision begins to spin. The stab of pain from where Nandor's fangs penetrated him has gradually bloomed into a heat that makes him shudder and lose all sense of time and space. Nandor's fingers keep fucking into him at a tortuously slow pace. Guillermo moves his hips, uncoordinated and incoherent, to meet Nandor's hand.

Nandor finally wrenches himself back from Guillermo's neck. The motion almost tears open the wound with its suddenness, but the vampire moves with a deadly precision and exits the puncture wounds as cleanly as he sank into them. Breath shuddering with the exertion of his self-control, Nandor blows against the neck of his lover, and then plants a kiss there and laps up the last of the crimson drops oozing lazily from the bite.

Guillermo blinks up at him through his glasses, disoriented. Nandor is a vision of disheveled arousal and possession above him. Guillermo reaches up to trace those scars, the glorious patterns of battle wounds and evidence of victories, with his shaking finger.

Nandor hisses at his touch and thrusts into Guillermo with a third finger added. Guillermo's mouth falls open.

Nandor caresses the mark he left in his lover's neck. The hand wanders down to Guillermo's nipples, and then to his chest scars. He dips his head down to pepper more kisses across those crescent moons of pink. Guillermo babbles something as Nandor's hair fans out and tickles him across his torso.

"Mine," Nandor growls against his beating heart.

Guillermo's heart lunges. "Fuck me. Nandor, fuck me."

Nandor pulls back just long enough to shed his own underwear, which has been soaked through during all this time he was worshiping Guillermo's body and partaking of his blood. Guillermo can see it now in his eyes, the pupils blown wide till even his irises seem black, obsidian, shining and consumed with hunger and satisfaction.

Guillermo braces himself a little awkwardly on one elbow to lean up and run his hand up and down the length of Nandor's cock. Nandor gives himself completely to a shudder at the warmth of the human hand. "Guillermo," he breathes, unhinged, and he falls forward and lands unevenly on his elbows to catch himself before he crushes his lover under his weight.

"Fuck me," Guillermo says again.

Nandor's shaking. Only Guillermo can tell, this close, with nothing separating them. Nandor presses his face into Guillermo's shoulder, nose jutting up against his collarbone, and finds his lover's entrance and pushes in.

Guillermo's hands fly up to tangle in Nandor's black waves. He's speechless, all breath punched from him as Nandor keeps pushing into him, and he can't focus on anything except the feeling of his vampire filling him up and his vision tunneling and Nandor's tongue lapping intermittently at the drops of blood still pooling at the side of his neck.

He thought it would be like sinking. Falling, maybe, as though into the open graves he dug for all those corpses all those eleven years.

It is sinking, but it's sinking backwards into the open sky, arms out, heart bared, ready for anything and feeling so alive.

"Nandor, Nandor," he repeats senselessly against Nandor's hair. The vampire thrusts twice more and bottoms out inside him.

They're both shaking together. Suddenly, viciously, Guillermo is overcome with the tidal need to cry.

"Breathe, Guillermo," Nandor speaks against the crook of his neck.

So Guillermo does. He breathes, twice, deeply, then three times, and Nandor lets him adjust to the size and weight of him before he starts to move again.

He fucks into Guillermo with a slow kind of desperation. He gathers himself together enough to turn his attention back to Guillermo's chest and belly. Nandor runs his hands down the chest scars, splays fingers on the soft flesh wrapping his ribs, lays his head down against the human's sternum for a second to listen to that wild heartbeat losing control.

Guillermo responds with kisses of his own along the blade scars on Nandor's bicep. "I love your scars," he murmurs. "I love your marks."

"They're ugly," Nandor says.

"They're--beautiful." 

Nandor shuts him up with another deep-tongued kiss. He pulls back and snaps his hips forward again, driving Guillermo into the mattress, and starts fucking him harder, unable to hold back any longer.

Guillermo cries out against Nandor's lips and the vampire drinks up the moans of his unraveling like he devoured his blood. The sounds of their fucking fill the room. Guillermo grunts from the thrusts--stops struggling to raise his hips to meet Nandor's--and yanks on Nandor's hair and submits himself to the pounding. A litany of _yes, yes, yes, there, fuck yes_ springs from him like music to Nandor's ears.

Just when Guillermo thinks he's overwhelmed by the sensation of it all, Nandor adjusts himself up from his elbows and twines his fingers into Guillermo's as he fucks him. He sweeps their interlocked hands up until they're on either side of Guillermo's head, and Guillermo's consciousness swirls again from the emotion tied to holding hands so suddenly and intensely as his vampire fills him and stares down straight into his eyes.

The unnamed taste of want in Nandor's gaze and his well-timed thrust upward send Guillermo hurtling over the edge. He clenches and cries out all voiceless and spent in his climax.

Nandor fucks him through it but follows soon after. He pulls out and pumps himself until he comes in ribbons over Guillermo's stomach. Head tilted back, mouth open and fangs still tipped in faint red, he is to Guillermo the picture of the god of his dreams.

Nandor collapses onto the bed at Guillermo's side. It's not lost on the human that on one side their hands are still clasped together, sweaty and firm and never letting go.

Guillermo mouths something incoherent along the lines of _wow_ up at the ceiling. And then the urge to weep blindsides him again in full force, and he gives up, tired and smiling, and gives himself into it.

"Meri jaan," Nandor mumbles. He squeezes Guillermo's hand once. "What's wrong?"

Guillermo tries to answer him. He puts his best effort into it. Thinks about the blood he's shed over the years, from the pressure of his canines against his own tongue, and thinks about what it's meant to him all these years. Thinks about the blood he's shed today, freely given, plundered and partaken of by another.

Thinks about saints and scenes of sacrifice. Wonders if, finally, what he's offered to the eldritch faerie of the forest will be enough.

And he remembers, for the first time since he graduated from high school, the story of Saint Valentine.

The torture and the martyrdom. The suffering they called a sacrifice for his God. The spilling of his blood, the roll of his head, and the ascent of his grotesque and mutilated carcass into the canonized symbol of love.

Seconds stretch into a minute of silence. For how can he utter even one of these things to Nandor at his side, his Nandor, his vampire, his lover, his life?

And then he decides it doesn't matter. He can be a saint or a sinner--a martyr or a slayer--and it will all be one and the same, because he's Guillermo de la Cruz.

"Nothing," he says to Nandor. "Hold me, please."

Nandor curls around him without a second thought like they were always meant to find each other's bodies this way.

"Okay," Nandor breathes against the back of his neck. His voice is already gravelly with exhaustion. He runs his free hand lazily through the curls at the very top of Guillermo's head. "Okay, Guillermo. But if you remember, wake me up and tell me."

Guillermo lets out a little grin and laugh at that. He lets the tears drip down the bridge of his nose and smiles into the open room with a rare and novel moment of understanding.

He is Guillermo de la Cruz. He simply _is_. He is something, maybe just shy of loved, and he will never be nothing again.

_To love another person is to see the face of God. -Victor Hugo, Les Misérables_

**Author's Note:**

> So...can we have a moment of silence for the fact that the entire sex scene was written on my phone at 1 in the morning?
> 
> On a more serious note, yes this is almost a vent fic. The lines I wrote for the scene with Guillermo's father were not invented, but lifted straight from when I came out to my mother as trans. Hopefully by putting it all down to paper, I'm able to release some of the monstrosity that has lived inside me since then.
> 
> I'd like to also add that I am very religious and mean no flippancy with all of the imagery in this fic. I grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home and only found the strength last year to leave the toxic parts of that upbringing behind and convert to Judaism, which has helped immensely in my journey of understanding where I exist in relation to God and to my sexuality.
> 
> I'm very curious and eager to know if and how any of this fic resonates with you. Which were the hardest parts? Which were the ones you liked best? Drop a comment below! I love talking with you!! <3 -kaleb
> 
> [moodboard for this verse](https://www.pinterest.com/kcbarrie/escrita-fic-moodboards/wwdits-tender-is-the-night/)
> 
> My socials:  
> My tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> My insta: kc.barrie  
> My wattpad: kalebbarrie


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